I only see this getting worse in the future. There just isn't enough work to go around anymore. How many white collar/service jobs don't involve any actual work? I just hope our economic system can adjust so we don't have a perpetual, growing underclass.
I believe this is an illusion. It always seems like technology is eliminating jobs, but it has always tended to create as many as it kills, which is why after hundreds of years of new labor-saving inventions, the number of jobs is still close to the number of people who want them.
That graph is the scariest thing I've seen about this recession, and I think it makes a pretty convincing case that this time actually is different.
I honestly think unskilled labor is dying off. I can't imagine what new jobs can be done with minimal education that won't be automatable within the next decade, and many existing jobs will be lost as well. It's a matter of time before people start smashing self-checkout machines.
Definitely a scary graph. But surely it's more likely that it is a graph of a bad recession happening than a sign that a trend that has run for hundreds if not thousands of years has stopped at this exact point in history.
The unemployment rate in the US peaked out at about 2.5x what it is now in the Great Depression. Even now the US is the US isn't really in that bad of shape for a developed nation; it's about 2% higher than most EU countries.
The US has just had very low unemployment for the last 15 years or so, so it feels more dramatic. It was actually higher than now at one point in the early 80s.
Is it not our goal as programmers to make manual labor unnecessary? Even if Google (or LexisNexis) is a poor substitute for a librarian, it has likely reduced the economic demand for simple research. While making society as a whole more wealthy, it permanently removes jobs from the market. If this age-old employment trend were to change, now is exactly when I would expect it to happen.
On second thought, what I'm thinking of is even broader than unskilled labor. Plenty of jobs require training or minimal advanced education, but they could still be done by computers or robots. Manufacturing, retail, accounting, and similar fields seem easily automatable in the near future. For instance, once reliable anti-theft systems are built, many retail jobs will be eliminated.
I think this is part of the illusion mentioned above. Throughout the history of technological advancement you have the destruction of jobs that seem very hard to replace.
When industrialisation began you had massive shifts that were probably scarier then the ones we see now. One relatively unskilled person could create hundreds of nails effectively destroying all employment in nail making. It would have seemed ridiculous to suggest that more people would be working in manufacturing stuff 100 years later when artisans were being replaced by machines at insane rates. Then we started consuming many more nails (and other stuff) because they were cheap and making many more nails. making became the staple employer.
One thing that might give you hope is reconsidering the flexibility of certain aspects of the labour market. There is no reason to assume that we need x unskilled jobs and y low-skilled jobs because there are inherently x & y unskilled and low skilled people in the market. Earlier generations of automation actually replaced fairly skilled labour with relatively unskilled labour. You didn't need to apprentice for 5 years to make forks. There is good reason to assume we can go the other way too, in fact, most advanced economies have done this.
Making nail manufacturing more efficient freed up labor to manufacture more complex and valuable things. Automating the entire manufacturing industry will require workers to shift to something that isn't manufacturing.
"Earlier generations of automation actually replaced fairly skilled labour with relatively unskilled labour ... There is good reason to assume we can go the other way too..."
The other way is vastly more difficult. If you replace unskilled jobs with skilled jobs, more people will need more education. What happens to the people who aren't capable of learning more complicated things?
Based on history, it's very likely that I'm wrong. Based on the facts of this specific case, it seems hard to justify the need for non-creative labor.
Automating the entire manufacturing industry will require workers to shift to something that isn't manufacturing.
That is very related to the point I was trying to make and why I used nails instead of clothes. Nail making had been important for a long time and required lots of people. Automation led to 10,000% or more increase in the number of nails per person. A handful of today's nailmakers can manufacture more nails then all the world's nailmakers a few centuries ago. It was effectively automating the entire industry.
The other way is vastly more difficult
Maybe. I'm not sure. I do think it's a fallacy however to think, as politicians seem to, of "number of unskilled workers" as some sort of constant that we can prod & shift slightly but essentially more of less the same.
Technology made nail manufacturing more efficient, but the cost savings created new products to be manufactured. This phase of technological advancement will effectively eliminate manufacturing as a profession. The savings may lead to more new products, but robots will manufacture those too. It truly is a unique moment in history, which is why I think the lessons of the past may not apply.
I'm not trying to demonstrate how the economic transition will mimic earlier ones (though, I am tempted), just how the illusion might.
A lot of what you say now could have been said at any point, particularly tipping points, which are by definition, unique. Try taking your perspective to the 18th century when Adam Smith came up with the example I bastardised. To a manufacturer of pins (Smith's example) it must have appeared that all jobs were dissolving: Adam Smith estimated (his high estimate) a productivity increase from 1 to 4800 pins per day per person. Even if demand for pins grew ten or one hundred fold, the vast majority of pin makers (47/48 pin makers after a 100X increase in demand) would end up unemployed. Pins were just one unimportant example.
There are two things that would have seemed unbelievable to his contemporaries: (1) That demand could possibly increase by that much, not just for pins, but for stuff. How much can you eat? How much can you wear? (2) That all these people made redundant by machines would ever be needed for anything. Even if all these pins (and other stuff) made manufacture of other stuff cheaper (this would have been less part of the consciousness then), all that other stuff will be manufactured by machines too. If new stuff gets invented and manufactured (this would have also been unintuitive at the time) it too will be made by machines.
I think the trick to understanding the point of this example is the magnitude: 1 to 4800. For all practical purposes (at the time) that meant getting rid of all pin makers in the same way (actually, much more) as auto-checkout will get rid of all checkout chicks.
Accounting might actually be safer, but not because of job requirements. It is one of those "blame-a-person / someone needs to testify" type of positions that could be problematic going the computer / overseas route.
Plumbers, Electricians, etc probably are OK, since robots really need to advance to replace them (like quantum leap) and locality is important. Manufacturing is probably hosed, and that is a huge problem.
Government insures that account is kept around with crazy regulation that complicates the entire thing. A simple tax system which could be done by anyone online because of simplification of the tax system would create an enormous efficiency gain.
Having done a little bit of work in plumbing with my dad I'd have to say that the home service type plumbing isn't getting automated anytime soon. But the manufacturing based plumbing such as installing plumbing into caravans I can see eventually getting automated.
I guess one problem may be that the new jobs require skills that the old jobs didn't, and not all of the newly unemployed would be able to acquire those skills.
I agree on the influence of new technologies, but the current economic downturn has had nothing to do with that.
The fact is that many people are unemployed now due to the eceonomy being as it is, and there seems to be a consensus that things won't change anytime soon in that regard.
Couple that (on a slightly longer term perhaps) to the end of cheap, abundant oil to fuel every aspect of modern civilisation, and I think there could well be an issue of how to have everyone employed effectively.
You are probably right. My intuition is that technology should be eliminating more jobs. The demand of the world can be met with less and less workers. I'm having a tough time picturing the new jobs that are going to emerge, but I suppose that scenario is much more likely than the ruling class allowing a disaffected underclass to emerge.
What's going on in the country -- that of which I have some direct experience -- is far more than any one personal anecdote. Your experience, in fact, is anecdotal.
I think the only reasonable solution is to stimulate regional economies by limiting trade with cheaper outside areas. The only people that really benefit from importing everything from cheap countries are the people with money in the first place. The working class gets put out of work and the middle class become the new serfs.
